Even today I still get letters from young students here and there who say, Why are you people trying to program intelligence? Why dont you try to find a way to build a nervous system that will just spontaneously create it? Finally I decided that this was either a bad idea or else it would take thousands or millions of neurons to make it work and I couldnt afford to try to build a machine like that.

I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone.

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. ... We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carrolls Alice might have phrased it: Youre nothing but a pack of neurons.

Hebb's rule, saying that two neurons firing together will strengthen the connection and make it easier for the two neurons to illicit a response from the third in neural networking. This is a catch-phrase, a summary, not a verbatim quote. Hebb explains his idea at length in The Organization of Behavior (1949).

Thus a nerve element, a nerve entity, or neuron, as I propose to call it, consists‥of the following pieces:(a) a nerve cell, (b) the nerve process, (c) its collaterals, and (d) the end-branching.[Coining the word neuron in the sense of a nerve cell.]

In original German text by Waldeyer in Berliner Klin. Wochenschr. (13 July 1891), 691:1. As translated in Brain (1891), 14, 569. Note: The word neuron was used earlier in difference senses, now obsolete, by B.T. Lowne (1883) for the neural part of the compound eye of athropods, and by B.G. Wilder (1884) for the neuraxis.

We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept.

When carbon (C), Oxygen (o) and hydrogen (H) atoms bond in a certain way to form sugar, the resulting compound has a sweet taste. The sweetness resides neither in the C, nor in the O, nor in the H; it resides in the pattern that emerges from their interaction. It is an emergent property. Moreover, strictly speaking, is not a property of the chemical bonds. It is a sensory experience that arises when the sugar molecules interact with the chemistry of our taste buds, which in turns causes a set of neurons to fire in a certain way. The experience of sweetness emerges from that neural activity.

[N]o scientist likes to be criticized. But you dont reply to critics: Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. Im very fond of it. Its done you no harm. Please dont attack it. That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesnt work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- Carl Sagan